UKIP’s smooth operator?

From European Voice's Entre-Nous column

5/18/04, 5:00 PM CET

Updated 4/23/14, 8:29 PM CET

Let’s hope that the UK Independence Party’s star recruit – former British MP Robert Kilroy-Silk – can be relied upon to present a more sophisticated argument during the European election campaign than the party’s best-known martyr to political correctness, George Staunton.

The 78-year-old UKIP activist from Liverpool was charged with racially aggravated criminal damage after putting up a party poster which read ‘Keep the Pound, Leave the EU’ and, astonishingly, writing alongside it ‘Don’t forget the 1945 War’ and ‘Free Speech for England.’

On second thoughts, maybe the party has picked the right man, bearing in mind that Kilroy-Silk recently lost his BBC job after describing Arab peoples as “suicide bombers, limb amputators and women repressors”.

There is something splendidly parochial about the state-aid investigation launched last week by the European Commission’s competition department into JC Decaux, a French advertising company. The question …